I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

Literature is the real life of imaginary people.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic.

There’s an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but to give the thing an extraordinary flow so you don’t notice at what point that you’re actually overwhelmed by this. There’s no showiness, at all. It’s the opposite of showiness. I think, if it was a painting, it could be very grey abstract, almost, with some lines and very, very beautiful. But you wouldn’t have a notion of where the beauty was.

(Talking about the short stories of Alistair MacLeod, who he discovered while working on The Modern Library.)